Ford Consul Capri, around 1961/62. The original Classic was made “suitable for the golf club car park” when this was considered aspirational, I guess. The ‘Capri Project’ was code-named Sunbird – the mystique of cool motoring.

Never a Mustang, but remember Schumacher…

Gary Boswell, poet/writer, edited the two poetry anthologies The Bees Knees and The Bees Sneeze for Stride in the early ’90s.

I knew Gary at the time from his reading and poetry workshops I arranged at my school in Devon after the first publication, along with other writers from that book, including then Stride publisher and poet Rupert Loydell, and also my getting three poems in the second of these two wonderful anthologies for younger readers.

I also met Gary many years ago, quite by accident, in the Ulverston, Cumbria, carpark. He or I should have written a poem about that. I don’t know for sure, but I think he still lives in the area – possibly now Grange-over-Sands – and I know he has written for local papers like The Westmorland Gazette, and elsewhere on his other great love, betting, linked to sports like non-league football, women’s grand slam tennis, UK National Hunt Horse Racing and US flat track horse racing.

There is a lay-by mobile cafe on the A590 between Grange-over-Sands and Kendal, seemingly no longer is use, and as Gary would appear to have or have had a range of jobs, whenever I passed it recently on a visit again to Ulverston, I naturally wondered if this was his:

Perhaps I’ll write a poem about this one day…

This house with

its G-Plan living-room / a lineage of photo albums / framed embroidered landscapes / denial seeped deep into its walls / the boxed silverware and its DNA of Christmas meals / milk in the freezer / so much forgetfulness / its meaninglessness of ornaments / dusty hooks where pictures once hung / steam trains puffing a past / my signed poetry books / paeons to Royalty / so many Syd Lawrence albums / collectors’ plates like beacons / boxes packed and waiting / medicines nearly sorted / places he fell into / a message from the Queen / only echoes as a home

He pulls up outside his house and I walk over the road from where we are staying this week at the mother-in-law’s to say hello to Ray who has got his own gravy – the good pension, he tells me in talking about elderly needs, and all that this buys layered in the back of the car, this red runaround which uncannily through an unknowing local purchase by Ray once belonged to my father-in-law Jim who had driven it till quite old and with a shade more geriatric danger than his neighbour now does – parked half on and half off the kerb – and then Ray’s oblivious disregard for, at the time, a dribbling nose, and his young man’s performances in the Black and White Minstrels all those years ago which we only learned in a passing anecdote while talking about music at Jim’s funeral.

Accumulation of knowledge
is properly sequenced about:

the colon
…ellipsis

and Jack the Ripper.

10,000,000 memorised grammatical terms
properly sequenced to allow

apostrophe and
Newton’s First Law

in an eighteen page appendix.

Incremental accumulation of knowledge
is properly sequenced about –

using evidence /
parallelograms using evidence –

and James I.

The spirit of Hirsch
and prescribed knowledge,

possessive pronoun and
more valuable skills,

calculate the area of what pupils learn.

[Source: Knowledge and the Curriculum, Nick Gibb introduction]